So many many things to be thankful for this year!

With Thanksgiving just behind us, and my travel schedule for the year ending, I am finally home for a month and a half.

What a busy, wonderful year this has been! I have so much to be thankful for. It was less than a year ago in mid January that I quit my day job and decided to give this "beady thing" the chance I thought it deserved, and it paid off.. I have traveled far and wide teaching beady classes and giving presentations, all over the country from Alaska to Florida and many places inbetween.

My calendar for next year is already full, plus half of the year after that too.

That is huge! I went from worrying that I won't be able to pay rent to knowing for sure that I can for a year and a half ahead. Doing exactly what I want to be doing with my life, spreading the love of beads to everyone who, much like myself has a tendency to want to roll around in shiny little seed beads, because ladies and gents, some of us are just born dragons, and it is a beautiful thing to be, indeed.

I learned so much this year ... Every time I have the good fortune to give a workshop, I learn something new from the good peeps participating. It's definitely a back and forth process, and when we all put our heads together, everyone leaves richer, filled with more inspiration and creative ideas than we know what to do with.

 All these travels have enriched my spirit and soul and filled me up with all sorts of ideas for future projects.

 And that is why it's essential for me to have times like right now, when I will have over a month to develop new designs, work on competition pieces and get ready for next year's traveling. I have a list that's longer than Santa's for the things that need to get done during this time...

 Because as great as traveling around  the country is, I still have to come up with  exciting new projects to tempt my beady friends with, so they come and take my classes. I don't want to get stale. I want to keep on hunting around for exceptional elements and create cool, enticing designs around them. And so travel, and creative time still need to be balanced out, which is also something I learned this year, when I scheduled some of my trips so close together, that for a couple months I was only home inbetween trips  for not more than 4 days.

Because I am so happy go lucky and full of energy and bright eyed and bushy tailed just to be allowed to do what I am doing, it worked out. My dear husband put up with me, but next year I am spreading things out a bit more and will try to work on having my Etsy store open more. This year in August before things got really busy I had to close the Etsy store simply because I wasn't home enough or had enough stock on hand to be able to keep it open. I want to work on that too...

Well, I am ever so thankful for all the people in my life who made this year possible for me. Friends that became family, and family, that supported me through all the craziness and made it all possible. Thank you all! You know who you are... I am getting gushy just thinking about all the love I received without which this would not have been possible.

In case you read through all this hoping for eye candy, I got that too. I updated my bracelet section, necklaces and collars  too. Added a new class in two colors, well, technically they are different enough that I could almost call them too separate things, but they are Sunrise & Sunset Shores.

Just for good measure here are those pictures again, and some other pieces I finished in the last few months.

 Then here are some pictures of a pendant I made for a friend:

And some random stuff:

 This is Loki. She is Sammy's girlfriend. She followed her belowed's paw  steps into stardom as a canine supermodel.

Wee pendant...

Angler fishie for my friend Helena Tang-Lim.

An ammolite bracelet,

A labradorite pendant,

A bracelet made with a Stuart Abelman focal.

Two labradorite pendants .

A very simple little blue bracelet that features some new shapes. Very textural...

A bracelet called Visitation, with an angel by Dorcas Midkiff.

This one is called Enchanted Something. I made this while in New Mexico, where every single thing is called enchanted something.

And that's that. Thank you for reading and looking.